Louise Zamparutti
Universities of Wisconsin Fellow (2025-2026)
Associate Professor, English, UW-La Crosse
Monument in Motu: The Positionality of Place
Why is fascism back in style? My book project interrogates one aspect of this: the popularity of memorial sites and structures that honor World War II fascists in Italy. Specifically, I examine the Foiba di Basovizza, a recently established memorial in northeast Italy. Through an autoethnographic approach that incorporates my liminal cultural, national, and scholarly identity, I’ll explain how my family history and upbringing and my pre-PhD career in dance and choreography led me to this memorial and mesh with rhetorical and new materialist theories to inform my theoretical perspective. My goal with this project, and my biggest challenge, is to connect this case study to broader forces driving fascist appeal worldwide and to offer a new way to examine how extremist thought and action can become appealing to wide audiences.
Louise Zamparutti is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. She has published in Research in Social Change, Rhetoric Review, Romance Studies, and Human Remains and Violence, and the edited volumes A Century of Italian War Narratives (Brill, 2023) and Covid Communications: Exploring Pandemic Discourse (Springer, 2023). Her stage play, Identità/Identiteta, was produced in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and taught in contemporary drama courses at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. She has received grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, Fulbright, the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency, the American Association for Italian Studies, and the Milwaukee Slovenian Arts Council.
*Events currently open only to 2025-26 fellows due to space concerns; please contact IRH at info@irh.wisc.edu to be added to a cancellation list for in-person events.*